matching blue robe is draped. She debates pulling the belt through the loops on the robe, starts to do that, her hands trembling now, loses patience with the task, and simply drops it on the floor, alongside his shoes and socks.
She looks at her watch again.
It is almost ten o'clock.
Somewhere a church bell begins tolling the hour.
The sound brings back a poignant memory she can't
quite recall. A Sunday sometime long ago? A picnic
preparation? A little girl in a flowered sunsuit? She stands listening to the tolling of the bell. The sound almost causes her to weep. She continues standing stock still in the silent apartment, the church bell tolling in the distance. And at last the bell stops. She sighs heavily, and goes back to the bed again.
Her father is lying crosswise on it, just the way she
dropped him, on his back, his legs bent at the knees and
trailing to the floor. She goes to him and lifts the legs,
turning the body so that he is lying properly now, his head
on the pillow, his feet almost touching the footboard. She
frees the blanket from beneath him, draws it down to the
foot of the bed. She knows it will appear odd that he is in bed with his clothes on, knows a safer pretense would be to disrobe him before pulling the blanket up over his chest. But she has never seen her father naked in her lifetime, and the prospect of undressing him, the horrible thought of seeing his naked body cold and blue and shriveled and dead is so chilling that she takes an involuntary step backward, shaking her head, as if refusing even to consider such an act. The horror, she thinks. The horror. And pulls the blanket up over him, to just beneath his chin, hiding all but his face from view.
She goes to the phone then, and dials , and calmly
tells the operator that she's just found her father dead in
bed and asks her to please send someone.
'The girl was in shock,' Alexander said. 'She didn't know what she was doing.'
'She just told us she was planning insurance fraud,'
Carella said.
'No, she didn't say that at all. She doesn't even know
what the policy says. Is there really a suicide exclusion
clause in that policy? Who knows? All she knows is that
there's a policy in her father's safe deposit box. What kind
of policy, in what amount, she doesn't know. So how can
you say she was planning insurance fraud?'
'Well, gee, Counselor,' Carella said, 'when someone
tries to make a suicide look like a natural death . . .'
'She didn't want the world to believe her father killed himself,' Alexander said.
'Bullshit,' Lieutenant Byrnes said.
One of the female officers had taken Cynthia Keating
down the hall to the ladies' room. The three detectives were still sitting at the long table in the interrogation room. Alexander was standing now, facing them, pleading his case as if he were facing a jury. The detectives looked as if they might be playing poker, which perhaps they were. Carella had taken the lead here, questioning the Keating woman, eliciting from her what amounted to a confession to at least two crimes, and perhaps a third: Attempted Insurance Fraud. He looked a bit weary after almost twelve hours on the job. Meyer sat beside him like a man holding a royal flush in spades, wearing on his face a look of supreme confidence. The lady had told them all they needed to know. Alexander could do his little dance from here to Honduras, but he couldn't tap his way out of this one. Sitting with cards like these, Meyer knew the lieutenant would tell them to book her on all three counts.
'You really want to send that girl to jail?' Alexander asked.
Which was a good question.
Did they?
She may have been contemplating insurance fraud while committing certain criminal acts in order to establish a later claim, but until she actually submitted the claim, she hadn't actually committed the fraud, had she? So was what she'd done really too terribly harmful to society? Did they really want to send her to prison with ladies who had cut up their babies and dropped them
down the sewer? Did they really want to send a nice Calm's Point housewife to a place where she'd be forced to perform sexual acts upon hardened female criminals who'd murdered liquor store owners or garage attendants? Was that what they really wanted?
It was a good question.
Until Carl Blaney called at eight-thirty that night to
say he was just heading home after having completed the
full autopsy on Andrew Henry Hale. He thought Carella
might like to hear the results.
'I was running a routine toxicological analysis on his
hair,' Blaney said. 'Washed, desiccated, and extracted
hair samples with organic solvents. Injected the extracts
into the spectrometer, and compared the results against
known library samples.'
'What'd you find?'
'Tetrahydrocannabinol.'
'English, Doc.'
'Marijuana. Did you find any in the apartment?'
'No.'
'But that's not all the hair revealed.'
'What else?'
'Rohypnol.'
'?ow-fin-all?' Carella asked.
'R-O-H-Y-P-N-O-L,' Blaney said. 'The brand name
for a drug called flunitrazepam.'
'I never heard of it.'
'We don't see much of it in this city. No emergency-
room episodes, no deaths resulting from its use. It's a benzodiazepine, pretty popular in the South and Southwest. Young people use it in combination with alcohol and other drugs.'
'I thought you said this was asphyxia.'
'It was. Bear with me. The hair results sent me back
for another look at his blood. This time I was focusing
on flunitrazepam and its -amino metabolites. I found
only moderate levels of the parent drug—concentrations not significant enough to have contributed to the fatality.
But enough to conclude that he'd definitely ingested at
least two milligrams.'
'Indicating?'
'Indicating he couldn't possibly have hanged himself.
He'd have been unconscious. You're looking at a homi
